Information technology professionals rely on receiving current and accurate system and network security information. A security threat on the network, such as an internet virus outbreak or an intrusion onto a private network, must be detected and acted upon quickly to protect the resources on the system. Many common systems provide passive notifications, such as web pages, which are updated by an administrator when new information becomes available. A user may log on and browse to the web page to view the current network status and a listing of current or past security alerts. Active notifications may also be sent to subscribers through electronic mail (email), pager, voice mail, fax, SMS, or instant messaging. Such notifications may arrive in a subscribers mailbox, in the case of email or voice mail, or may be presented on the subscriber's computer terminal.
Handheld mobile devices have opened up new possibilities for remotely sending and receiving information. However, until recently, the limited power, storage capacity, communications bandwidth, and user interface capabilities of these devices have limited their effective presentation of multimedia data. Today, many current handheld devices can quickly retrieve and present robust audio and video data. For example, multimedia content such as streaming video webcasts are now supported by a wide array of mobile devices. However, internet security alerts, system information, and the like, are not typically provided in such forms. The need to rapidly disseminate this information to users often prevents the production of high-quality multimedia data. Instead, simple text, HTML, or the like are used to convey current security information. Rich multimedia content on such topics, if generated at all, may only be generated much later, after recording and producing video to convey the information.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide internet security alerts to mobile devices with streaming video technology. Current systems may not sufficiently provide multimedia content to currently and accurately describe an event, such as a system or network status update, current internet security threat, or related breaking news item. Such multimedia data may be merely posted passively for users to observe, or may instead be transmitted to subscribers only after the lengthy production of a multimedia presentation.